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Cope with the Noise!

Monthly Archives: March 2018

I received an email from my kid’s high school administration this past Wednesday. The message advised me that many of the students participated in a 17-minute walk-out as part of the nation-wide event to remember and support the 17 faculty and kids who were killed in the Parkland, Fl school shooting.

The message further informed me that the kids who participated enjoyed the full support of the school administration in exercising their First Amendment rights and would not be penalized in anyway. All well and good, as far as it goes. School is a highly appropriate venue for kids to learn about their rights; and the curriculum should be flexible enough to incorporate current events when they provide salient learning moments.

There is a problem, though. There have been plenty of such events over the span of my kid’s school career, but the walkout on Wednesday was only the second one I can remember that generated a “learning moment” significant enough to warrant a message to parents from the administration. (The first was the recent solar eclipse, and the message to parents was about viewing safety. Hardly controversial.)

Worse, the moment on Wednesday was billed locally as a lesson on practicing First Amendment rights and/or solidarity for the Parkland victims, families, and friends, but the ultimate aim of the organizers of the nation-wide event was further curtailment of Second Amendment rights.

If you’ll recall, there have been several mass shootings/mass murders during previous administrations, including several at schools, but no group saw fit to so dramatically use the nation’s school children as puppets to protest for more gun control during that span of time.

This time around, the shooting happened during a Republican administration in a county led by a sheriff that was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton for President, and a strong supporter of the Democrat Party. The sheriff and school district participated in an Obama Administration initiative designed to end the so-called “school to prison” pipeline. The initiative boils down to not arresting or prosecuting non-white school-age kids who violate the law, in order to keep them in school and show how tolerant and non-discriminatory the community is. The policy failed spectacularly. There was something on the order of 66 missed opportunities to keep the Parkland shooter from his appointment with infamy over the course of his high school career. But even with all of those chances, the future killer couldn’t make it to graduation. He was expelled. Fast-forward to valentine’s Day, 2018. When the shooting was in-progress, as many as four Broward County Sheriff’s Deputies felt no compunction to enter the school and attempt to stop the 19 year-old gunman. When it was all over, the killer was arrested. So even though he was given every chance, he will still end up going to prison (or the looney-bin)- straight from the scene of the 17 murders he committed in the school he was expelled from.

Did that come up in classroom conversations across the country before or after the Wednesday walk-out? No?

The organizers of the walkout would have us believe that the Parkland massacre was caused by the NRA and the AR-15. Their solution is more gun control. But Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was already under the most restrictive gun-control regime possible: It was a gun-free zone. It said so right on the label. On the other hand, the community was not a lunatic-free zone, and I’m not just referring to the shooter. 17 people were shot by the killer, and they were sacrificed on the alter of leftism as a consequence of virtue signaling by the lunatic leftist sheriff and the lunatic school board of Broward County, Florida.

So, school administrators: If you want to impress on me that my children are being taught in an environment where rights are respected and exercised, and were education includes free and open inquiry, and they are not just being indoctrinated into leftism and being fattened up for potential future sacrifice, here are few things you might try:

Mock elections during national election cycles

Current event and issue debates

A civics class that has each kid take on the role of a Founder, and over the course of the semester the “Founders” discuss rights and the purpose of government, and write a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution

A stand-alone course on logic, fallacies, reason, and critical thinking

Improved physical security

Allowing willing and able teachers and administrators to be armed, and advertising that fact to deter would-be killers

One of the roots of modern liberal thinking seems to be the premise that we are all “our brother’s keeper.” Under such a proposition, the idea that the individual might be responsible for his own safety and security, rather than “his brothers” (i.e., someone else, such as the police) is anathema, therefore it is worrisome when someone who does believe he is responsible for his own self protection takes those responsibilities seriously and arms himself – and in so doing also gives himself an increased ability to hurt and destroy (even though he has no such intent).

One of the roots of leftist thinking is that the collective (family, tribe, identity group, clan, ethnic group, party, race, state, religion, etc.) is the primary unit of existence, and individuals and individuality are lesser considerations. Here also the armed individual is to be feared. How dare he think himself worthier of protection than his fellow collective members? Take his weapons and cast him out!

Note the overlap in the two positions: The armed individual and his weapons are a threat to be feared, and protection is either someone else’s job, or it’s a collective responsibility applied only to the collective as a unit. In essence, the individual member of the collective is not responsible for himself, the collective is.

The majority of the mainstream media, academia, and international political bodies are either liberal or leftist. Even their most factual, “non-fake” news and research about mass shootings, murder rates, and guns usually begins from one of these collectivist premises, so of course they will generate, locate, and/or manipulate statistics that lend credence to their arguments. It is confirmation bias on an industrialized scale.

Nor are they alone. The rarer elements of the media, academia, and political bodies that lean right are just as likely to engage in confirmation bias. It is nearly impossible to find gun crime data untainted by either bias.

But here’s the thing: The United States of America was not founded on collectivist premises. It was founded on individualism. The attitude the founders enshrined in the Charters of Freedom (The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights) boils down to this premise: An individual is sovereign over his own life, so long as he does not violate the rights of others. The price of such individual freedom is individual responsibility. The individualist believes himself to be responsible for everything he does and everything he fails to do. That includes defense of self and of loved ones.

A collective built around the liberal or leftist premises outlined above looks at a mass school shooting and is predisposed to blame the feared object, or the Congress, or the President, or the NRA, or “society,” for the horrors. They are blaming institutions, iconic figures, or inanimate objects, not the individual perpetrator, because a collective can’t conceive of an individual as a unit of volitional action that goes against the collective.

The collective cries, “When will we pass a law banning these scary weapons?” “How many kids have to die?” And so on. This, despite the fact that laws already enacted for the very purpose fail to stop the perpetrators: It is illegal to commit murder; that doesn’t stop homicidal maniacs. It is illegal to take a firearm on to (most) school grounds (i.e., there is already a total gun ban on most school campuses); that doesn’t stop armed crazies from doing so. Certain firearms are, or have been, illegal to possess; that hasn’t made such guns magically evaporate.

Rational laws don’t stop mass murderers, especially when the murderer means to die in the commission of his crimes. But they do provide the basis for prosecutions and punishment, should the murder(s) be arrested, tried, and convicted. On the other hand, enacting more laws, each to prohibit lesser acts than those already illegal, in order to somehow make them more illegal, or to somehow deter the demonstrably un-deterrable, is absurdity. Adding laws on top of laws is not a rational strategy designed to actually prevent mass murders or enable more effective judicial proceedings. It is the panic response of a collective which can only serve to temporarily comfort the collective.

Even scarier? The worse mass-murders in US history weren’t committed by lunatics with guns, they were committed by by terrorists using airplanes (9/11) or trucks full of fertilizer and diesel fuel (Oklahoma City) as bombs, or even worse, by the very body the collective turns to for comfort and assurance: The government itself (Sand Creek, Wounded Knee, Waco).

The individualist sees the problem through a vastly different frame: People who are dangerously incompetent to exercise the responsibilities attendant in being free – must not be free. Such people should not have unsupervised access to the public. That would mitigate part of the problem. Of course, not all mass school shooters were known to be dangerously incompetent beforehand, but they all demonstrated a singular preference to target locations where it is highly unlikely they will meet any armed resistance: the “gun-free” zone. Ergo, the response of the person who has built their life around the individualist premise is that there shouldn’t be any such “gun-free zones,” and if some lunatic or terrorist disregards the risk to themselves and starts shooting up the place? SHOOT BACK!